Warhawk developers expand community – stat-o-rama

Dylan Jobe has posted up on the official PS blog about an exciting new feature for the Warhawk community. Don’t take our word for it. Mosey on over to www.myhawk.org and you’ll see what happens when fandom and studio backing merge in a perfect marriage of community and data.

The site (from ardent Warhawk player and super-fan Sugaboo) is an absolute treasure trove of stats and community features, all the more powerful now since the studio’s recent decision to proactively interactive with their player-base.

With Incognito now publically making the statistics behind Warhawk readily available, community sites like MyHawk can use the authentic data behind the online game to build their own imaginative web-sites.

Could this be the start of something new and inventive in console gaming?

With the use of this data, MyHawk.org can offer stats on any player that has ever played the game. You can look up when you played, for how long you played, how you did, clan information, whatever. Dylan says it best by stating:

” ..not just awards and medals! Every game, every clan, every player, every kill.”

OK, we admit that an XML feed of Warhawk data is a little hard to get excited about in general though it should be noted that there is an exciting precedent being set here by the Incognito development team.

As we’ve already seen with Killzone.com, Sony and its partner studios are putting some serious thought and effort into developing their games, not just solely on the PS3, but in tandem with other mediums such as the concept behind PSP interconnectivity (Resistance 2 and Resistance: Retribution comes to mind) and the likes of immersive online experiences like the aforementioned Killzone 2 site and MyHawk.org.

What we hope to see in future are more studios taking this brave step and making the raw data streams behind their games available to the community and letting dedicated (and somewhat technical) fans just run with it to see what they can come up with. It can only lead to greater connectivity between the makers of gamers and their players. Something that can only be viewed as good news for everyone involved.

What studios would you like to see follow Incognito’s lead and offer up the dark secrets of their games? What might a GTA world built on crime stat data offer fans? Will Infinity Ward surpass the already stellar Killzone.com with its cornucopia of community features when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 comes out later this year? Are we looking at a future where players can take data made available by the studios who make console games and make something truly unique and imaginative with it?